We can see our cities for the first time without the choking traffic, dirty air and honking horns that have so often made them intolerable.

Throughout the world, the coronavirus has forced extreme changes in our behavior in just days. And we’re already seeing the impact of those changes: On Monday, for example, Los Angeles had the cleanest air of any major city in the world. — The New York Times

The built environment of the Valley does not reflect the innovation that’s driving the region’s stratospheric growth; it looks instead like the 1950s. Looking at aerial views of midcentury campuses like the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs next to contemporary ones like Apple, it’s nearly impossible to tell the midcentury structures from the 21st-century ones. — New York Times

We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do. — Allison Arieff | the New York Times

“What we’re seeing right now is what I saw in 1996,” said Mr. Lloyd, a former president of sales and development at Cisco. “We all had I.P. routers and everything was done a certain way. At Cisco, we said, ‘You can carry that over the Internet,’ and everyone said, ‘No.’ But those high-speed networks made the Internet possible.” Hyperloop, he said, “will do to the physical world what the Internet did to the digital one.” — Allison Arieff – nytimes.com

American infrastructure is deferred home maintenance on a massive scale. We just keep putting it off until something major — and often catastrophic — happens, and then it ends up costing twice as much [...]

A century later, we’ve lost our collective faith in the power of great projects like the Golden Gate, not to mention our trust in the government to fix a pothole on time and on budget, let alone create an inspiring bridge. How can we restore that faith in possibility? — mobile.nytimes.com

L.A. has always been a place of experimentation, but now it appears to be in an architectural arms race, a competition to build the tallest, shiniest, and weirdest buildings. Adding to some Angelenos’ trepidation is how many of the projects popping up around the city are museums—built to last for 40 years or more, which is an eternity in a city known for knocking things down. — LA Magazine

The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists? — nytimes.com

“Ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything.” And it is this observation that for me epitomizes the problem of the driverless car — it’s the worst kind of solutionism. By becoming so enamored with how technology might transform the car, we’ve neglected to adequately explore how getting rid of cars might transform how and where we live. We’d do well to heed Gorz’s exhortation to “never make transportation an issue by itself.” — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

B2, a 32-story tower that is part of a 1,500-unit, mixed-use complex designed by SHoP Architects for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, will soon be the tallest modular building in the world. nARCHITECTS recently won adaptNYC’s competition to design a micro-unit apartment building, and will see its concept transformed into a 10-story building by 2015. It will be the first multiunit building in Manhattan to be built with modular construction. — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Arieff discusses how sustainability issues -- climate change, peak oil, declining resources -- suffer when they're thought of as trends; why Julius Shulman deserves to be in a sustainability hall of fame for his photographs showing how architecture is about buildings and people; and why, after years at the top of Dwell's masthead, she's done writing about gorgeous Italian closets and kitchens. — theatlantic.com

There is no more iconic suburb than Levittown, the postwar planned community built by the developer William Levitt in the late 1940s, so it is understandable that in launching Open House, a collaborative project to imagine a “future suburbia,” the Dutch design collective Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects would make it the focus of their inquiry. — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com